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- Imperial Earth
Arthur C. Clarkestandalone novel1975
similar byspace colonizationreflectivescience fictionfar futurehard science fiction
Imperial Earth is a science fiction novel by British writer Sir Arthur C. Clarke, published in 1975 by Gollancz Books. The plot follows the protagonist, Duncan Makenzie, on a trip to Earth from his home on Titan, in large part as a diplomatic visit to the U.S. for its quincentennial in 2276, but also to have a clone of himself produced. The book was published in time for the U.S. bicentennial in 1976.
- Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
series36 books1982
similar byspace colonizationscience fictionfar futurehard science fiction+1 more
The Mars trilogy is a series of science fiction novels by Kim Stanley Robinson that chronicles the settlement and terraforming of the planet Mars through the personal and detailed viewpoints of a wide variety of characters spanning 187 years, from 2026 to 2212. Ultimately more utopian than dystopian, the story focuses on egalitarian, sociological, and scientific advances made on Mars, while Earth suffers from overpopulation and ecological disaster.
- 2312
Kim Stanley Robinsonstandalone novel2012
similar byspace colonizationreflectivescience fictionfar futurehard science fiction
In the eponymous year, when Earth's ecology is degraded and humanity has settled throughout the solar system by terraforming and genetic engineering, mysterious disasters strike some human communities and an assortment of human types from throughout the system seek to find and eliminate the cause.
- The Songs of Distant Earth
Arthur C. Clarkestandalone novel1986
similar byspace colonizationreflectivescience fictionfar futurehard science fiction
The Songs of Distant Earth is a 1986 science fiction novel by British writer Arthur C. Clarke, based upon his 1958 short story of the same title. Of all of his novels, Clarke stated that this was his favourite. Prior to the publishing of the novel, Clarke also wrote a short step outline with the same title, published in Omni magazine and anthologised in The Sentinel in 1983.
- Nemesis
Isaac Asimovstandalone novel1989
similar byspace colonizationscience fictionfar future+2 more
The expanding population and ensuing ecological degradation of Earth leads to the establishment of orbital habitats which continue to compete with each other as well as with Earth, leading one of them to abandon the Solar System entirely, to establish itself around a neighboring star.
- The Martian Chronicles
series30 books1946
completed
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The Martian Chronicles (1950) is Ray Bradbury's fix-up novel, a chain of linked short stories following waves of settlers leaving a troubled Earth to colonize Mars and encountering its native Martians, before Earth itself is ultimately consumed by nuclear war.
- Aurora
Kim Stanley Robinsonstandalone novel2015
similar byspace colonizationreflectivescience fictionfar futurehard science fiction
Aurora is a 2015 novel by American science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson. The novel concerns a generation ship built in the style of a Stanford torus, traveling to Tau Ceti to start a human colony. The novel's primary narrative voice is that of the starship's artificial intelligence. Aurora was well received by critics.
- Rite of Passage
Alexei Panshinstandalone novel1968
similar byspace colonizationreflectivescience fictionfar future
Rite of Passage is a science fiction novel by American writer Alexei Panshin. Published in 1968 as an Ace Science Fiction Special, this novel about a shipboard teenager's coming of age won that year's Nebula Award, and was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1969.
- Destiny's Road
Larry Nivenstandalone novel1997
similar byspace colonizationscience fictionfar futurehard science fiction+1 more
Destiny's Road is a science fiction novel by American writer Larry Niven, first published in 1998. It follows Jemmy Bloocher's exploration of Destiny's Road, a long scar of once-melted rock seared onto the planet's surface by a spaceship's fusion drive. Jemmy is descended from the original Destiny colonists, who were stranded when their landing craft deserted them.
- Remnant Population
Elizabeth Moonstandalone novel1996
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From the dust jacket front flap of the Baen first edition: Alone at last... People had always told Ofelia what to do; for once she was going to do what she wanted. She refused to get on the cryo ships, refused to leave the only world she could call home. And when they finally came for her, she hid, not that the authorities looked all that hard for one crazy old woman. Now Ofelia is alone, content to live with no more demands on her self or her time, the only remaining settler on an abandoned planet. The new settlers arrive. At first she fears that they have come to reoccupy the settlement she has come to think of as hers - but they land far away. And as Ofelia secretly listens, they are slaughtered to the last child by stone-age aliens no one knew were there. Now it will be up to Ofelia to save the aliens from Earth's wrath...
- Helliconia
series4 books1982
completed
similar byspace colonizationreflectivescience fictionfar future
The Helliconia trilogy is a series of science fiction books by British writer Brian W. Aldiss, set on the Earth-like planet Helliconia. It is an epic chronicling the rise and fall of a civilisation over thousands of years as the planet progresses through its incredibly long seasons, which last for centuries.
- The Face of the Waters
Robert Silverbergstandalone novel1991
similar byspace colonizationreflectivescience fictionfar future
On the ocean world of Hydros -- a planet with no land beyond a scatter of artificial floating islands -- the human settlers of Sorve commit an offense against the native aquatic Hydrans serious enough to get their community banished, forbidden from settling on any other island. With nowhere else to go, Sorve's people set out across the water in a makeshift flotilla, chasing rumors of a mythical island called the Face of the Waters that may or may not exist, forced to reckon with what they owe the world they've spent generations treating as theirs. A Robert Silverberg novel of exile and search, told through Sorve's displaced islanders.
- Building Harlequin's Moon
Larry Niven & Brenda Cooperstandalone novel2005
similar byspace colonizationreflectivescience fictionfar futurehard science fiction
The first interstellar starship, John Glenn, fled a Solar System populated by rogue AIs and machine/human hybrids, threatened by too much nanotechnology and rife with political dangers. The John Glenn’s crew intended to terraform the nearly pristine planet Ymir, in hopes of creating a utopian society that will limit intelligent technology. But by some miscalculation they have landed in another solar system, and extremely low on the antimatter needed to continue to Ymir, they must shape the nearby planet Harlequin’s moon, Selene, into a new, temporary home. Their only hope of ever reaching Ymir is to rebuild their store of antimatter through decades of terraforming the moon. Gabriel, the head terraformer, must lead this nearly impossible task, with all the wrong materials. His primary tools are the uneducated and nearly illiterate children of the original colonists, born and bred to build Harlequin’s moon into a virtual antimatter factory. With no concept of the future and with life defined as duty, one girl, Rachel Vanowen, begins to ask herself the question: what will become of the children of Selene once the terraforming is complete.
- Learning the World
Ken MacLeodstandalone novel2005
similar byspace colonizationreflectivescience fictionfar futurehard science fiction
From the front flap of the Tor first printing: "Humanity has spread to every star within 500 light-years of its half-forgotten origin, coloring the sky with a haze of habitats. Societies rise and fall. Incautious experiments burn fast and fade. On the fringes, less modified humans get on with the job of settling a universe that has, so far, been empty of intelligent life. The ancient starship But the Sky, My Lady! The Sky! is entering orbit around a promising new system after a four hundred year journey. For its long-lived inhabitants, the centuries have been busy. Now a younger generation is eager to settle the system. The ship is a seed-pod ready to burst. Then they detect curious electromagnetic emissions from the system's Earth-like world. As the nature of the signals becomes clear, the choices facing the humans become stark. On Ground, second world from the sun, a young astronomer searches for his system's outermost planet. A moving point of light thrills, then disappoints him. It's only a comet. His physicist colleague Orro takes time off from trying to invent a flying-machine to calculate the comet's trajectory. Something is very odd about that comet's path. They are not the only ones for whom the world has changed. "We are not living in the universe we thought we lived in yesterday. We have to start learning the world all over again.""
- The World at the End of Time
Frederik Pohlstandalone novel1990
similar byspace colonizationreflectivescience fictionfar futurehard science fiction
World at the End of Time is a 1990 hard science fiction novel by American writer Frederik Pohl. It tells the parallel stories of a human and a plasma-based intelligence who manage to survive to the time near the heat death of the universe. The book is thus a combined work in speculative cosmology and space colonization.
- Semiosis
series3 books2018
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Semiosis is Sue Burke's science fiction trilogy: Semiosis (2018), Interference and Usurpation. It follows generations of human colonists on an alien world forming an uneasy, evolving relationship with Stevland, a highly intelligent sentient plant, as the colony's survival comes to depend on cooperating with a fundamentally non-animal intelligence. The trilogy follows one continuous colony's history across decades of story time.
- Manseed
Jack Williamsonstandalone novel1982
similar byspace colonizationreflectivescience fictionfar future
In the decades since i've read this novel somehow i forgot almost everything about it, except the powerful force it had on me. However, the the following description from http://www.fictiondb.com/author/jack-williamson~manseed~117359~b.htm seems to match my long ago reading experience: Egan Drake was a wealthy but unhappy visionary who died early and left behind only a powerful dream. He proposed to spread Mankind among the stars. Then there was Megan Drake. She took her brother's vision and made it real. At the Raven Foundation's New Mexico headquarters, she gathered around her experts in astronautics, biology, computer science, defense, and fusion propulsion. The project was simple in design yet grandiose in its aim: a thousand tiny ships would crawl to the stars; each that landed on an Earth-type planet would produce several dozen colonists; each colonist would be a product of the genes derived from Megan and her experts. Every ship would manufacture cyborgs for repairs and self-protection. But much of the technology was new and untried; no one could predict what might really occur at a millennia-long journey's end if, say, a cyborg fell in love or aliens were met or...
- Seed of Light
Edmund Cooperstandalone novel1959
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From the back cover of the Ballantine first edition: "The Solarian was a hundred metres high and, at its broadest point, twenty metres in diameter. It was designed to carry an initial crew of ten people - five men and five women - with provision for subsequent children. Yet in that vast hull every cubic metre of space was indispensable, for the ship was a self-contained world, required to support human life independently for centuries. No member of the crew, male or female, could regard themselves as a separate entity, an individual personality But each person was a part of a total life-unit, a dedicated nucleus that might one day expand into a tribe; that might, phoenixlike, bring forth a new human race."
- Isis
series3 books1980
completed
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The Keeper of the Isis Light, by Monica Hughes, opens a science-fiction trilogy for young readers set on the distant colony world of Isis, orbiting the star Ra, as new settlers from Earth arrive to find the planet already has a solitary young guardian who isn't glad to see them. The trilogy continues through The Guardian of Isis and The Isis Pedlar, later collected together as The Isis Trilogy.
- Hainish
series33 books1964
completed
similar byreflectivescience fictionfar future
The Hainish Cycle consists of a number of science fiction novels and stories by Ursula K. Le Guin. The cycle is set in a future history that features civilizations of human beings on planets orbiting a number of nearby stars, including Terra ("Earth"); these humans are contacting each other for the first time and establishing diplomatic relations, as well as setting up a confederacy under the guidance of the oldest of the human worlds, the peaceful planet Hain. In this history, human beings did not evolve on Earth, but they were instead the result of interstellar colonies planted by Hain in the distant past, after which interstellar travel ceased for an extended period. Some of the human races have new genetic traits, a result of ancient Hainish experiments in genetic engineering; this includes people who can dream while awake, and a world of hermaphroditic people who only enter active sexuality once per month, not knowing which sex will manifest in them. In keeping with Le Guin's narrative approach, she uses varied social and environmental settings to explore the anthropological and sociological outcomes of human evolution in those environments. The author often discounted the characterization of a so-called "Hainish Cycle".
- Elysium Cycle
series5 books1986
similar byscience fictionfar future+3 more
On the ocean-covered moon Shora, the Sharers -- an all-female society skilled in genetic engineering and committed to strict nonviolence -- face invasion by the militaristic Patriarchy, which cannot fathom a people who refuse to fight back with force. Joan Slonczewski's A Door into Ocean opens the Elysium Cycle by testing whether a philosophy built on the idea that 'to hurt is to be hurt' can actually survive violent occupation. Later books in the cycle, including Daughter of Elysium, The Children Star, and Brain Plague, carry the same interest in biology, pacifism, and alien societies into new settings.
- The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
Robert A. Heinleinstandalone novel1966
similar byspace colonizationscience fictionfar future
A technician discovers that the massive computer that operates everything on Luna (a prison colony) has become self-aware. He befriends it, but when he accompanied a beautiful girl to a dissident meeting, he encounters people who want to throw off the yoke of their Earth rulers.
- People of the Sky
Clare Bellstandalone novel1989
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From the flaps of the Tor first edition: "...Clare Bell has created the wonderfully strange and fascinating Oneway, where humans and Aronans, the graceful alien flyers their human partners need for survival in their village at the bottom of the deep Barranca "mother canyon" live in symbiotic harmony. It is two hundred years since Pueblo Indians followed the prophecy of the miraculous Blue Star Kachina that appeared during a ritual on ancient holy ground in the American Southwest. Funded by the tribe's endowment, a faction of the Pueblo tribe emigrated to the far star of the prophecy and found Oneway, a planet of plateaus and canyons like their native Southwest. Now, two hundred years later, the colony of the Pai Yinaye, "People of the Sky," as they call themselves, is only a legend to those who live in Oneway's high-tech enclaves. Kesbe Temiya, a restorer of antique aircraft, discovers the lost colony when her plane is forced down in a storm over the Barranca. Kesbe, herself the daughter of American Pueblo Indians, had been delivering a "Gooney Bird" - a World War II C-47 transport plane which had been stranded and preserved on the ice of a Greenland glacier - to its new owner at an airbase on Oneway. Rescued by a villager and his Aronan, she is taken to the isolated Pai village where the People, wary of outsiders, won't help her unless she accepts their traditions by undergoing the initiation rites, including bonding with her own Aronan. Nobody outside the tribe, not even a Pueblo like Kesbo, has ever undergone the intense ordeal of initiation. Before she is accepted, Kesbo's life will be transformed by the unique and alien experience that sets apart the Pai..."
